Naughty Karma

Chapter Twenty-Three Animal Urges

Karma got as far as the elevator door before she stopped, cursed and ran after him. She didn’t know how she felt about him—and the fact that he’d clearly slept with the maenad and saw no other use for his heart than in a business transaction—but she knew she didn’t want him to leave. It wasn’t logical, this desperation for him to stay, this bizarre certainty that if she could just get her arms around him, cling to him for a while, it would soothe the restless fears churning in her heart.

Logic had its day, but instinct was ruling the show now and instinct knew exactly what it needed. A tall, fierce warlock who took no prisoners and asked for nothing from anyone—until he came to her.

She slammed out of the front doors, straight into a storm. Inside the building, she’d barely been aware of the thunderheads gathering, but now wind and rain slapped her in the face, soaking the delicate silk of her blouse and plastering it to her skin in seconds.

She shivered, even though the rain was warm; Prometheus hadn’t left.

He strode toward her like a warrior intent on pillaging, head down, body tense. The rain began to pound, needles of it smacking into her skin, but Karma stood immobile, making no move to shield herself as she watched the freight train of sexual intent driving toward her. Lightning flashed and Prometheus lifted his head. He jerked to a stop when he saw her standing five feet in front of him, breathlessly watching him come.

His inky black gaze started at her sleek Louboutins—getting ruined in the deluge—and worked over her calves and the snug pencil skirt, pausing to study her soaked blouse as it outlined every curve, then rising to the length of her neck, her lips. When his eyes locked on hers, there was a stretching moment, a raw fraction of a second, when time seemed to shudder to a stop. The rain hung suspended in the air, flags froze on the breeze, and all that existed, all that was real, was the fierce hunger etched into every line of his face.

Then something snapped in him, some measure of control, some veneer of humanity, and he was on her. There was no time to prepare for the onslaught. The kiss was open-mouthed and already three steps down the road to mindlessness. His arms bound her to him, lifting her off her feet and up for a better angle. His tongue plunged between her lips, thrusting and tangling, and she met his frenzy with her own, clinging and pressing herself tight into his body. He growled into her mouth, the predator in him she’d always sensed no longer lurking beneath the surface but on full display. And she couldn’t get enough.

He broke the kiss, pulling back until they were eye to eye. Savage satisfaction pulsed through her at the look of raw lust on his face. She’d put it there. She’d done that. He lowered her until her feet touched the ground, his eyes shuttering. A little shiver of uncertainty spiked. He wasn’t ending things here, was he? Not now, God please not now.

Thunder rolled, reminding her of the storm that soaked them both. He set her away from him and rumbled darkly, “If you don’t want to do this right here in the parking lot, run.”

Karma gasped. The eroticism of the image—him driving into her against the side of the building, the storm providing all the cover either of them cared about, drenching them—was nearly enough to buckle her knees. She couldn’t think of a coherent response. Couldn’t think. Logic was gone. Thought was gone. It was all instinct. And when he growled low in his throat and took a step toward her, instinct surged in a flood of adrenaline and she ran.

She didn’t look back, but she could feel him behind her, the push of his magic raising the hair on the back of her neck. Through the lobby, into her office, she opened the panel, swiped her thumb to call the elevator and didn’t even have a chance to pull her hand back before he was spinning her, pinning her to the doors as the silk screen parted, his mouth back on hers. His hands locked around her wrists, pressing them to the door above her head and she pushed back, resisting so she could feel his strength trapping her exactly where he wanted her. She arched against him and he ground his hips into her, the hardness of him a luscious length against her abdomen.

The doors opened and she fell back, only his grip on her keeping them both from tumbling to the floor. He lifted her, spinning them both, and she felt a pulse of magic push against her skin as he carried her into the elevator like she weighed nothing more than a feather. Karma broke away, twisting to reach for the down button, but Prometheus caught her hands and dragged her mouth back to his, the down button lighting without either of them coming within a foot of it. Her lips curved against his—you had to appreciate a man with such varied talents.

The doors opened on her apartment and he lifted her again with one arm and a cushion of magic. She trembled against him, the tingle of his power leaving her highly sensitized wherever it touched. He strode quickly through her apartment, past the box with his rapidly beating heart trapped inside. In her bedroom, he dropped her onto the California king and stood over her, feet braced apart, looking down at her with a feral light burning in his eyes. He was pure, erotic temptation, but the time for tempting was done. They’d already fallen headlong into sin territory.

He shrugged off his jacket and it vanished with a flick of his fingers. As he stripped off his black T-shirt over his head, Karma reached for the buttons on her blouse.

“No,” he growled, stopping her with a look. “I’m going to do that.” His fierce frown didn’t ease until she took her hands away from the buttons, lifting them over her head. He nodded and went back to stripping off his own clothes, leaving her nothing to do but watch the show. And what a show it was. He wasn’t bulked up with muscle, but there was poetry in the composition of his limbs, each smooth, lean muscle curving into the next in a graceful, lithe strength. His boots and socks went the way of the jacket and T-shirt—disappearing before they could leave a drop of water on her floors. He reached for the button of his jeans and Karma came up on her knees.

“No.” She stopped him with a hand over his, feeling deliciously wicked as she echoed him. “I’m going to do that.”

He kept his hands on his zipper, looking for a moment like he would protest, before that devil’s smile that could make her wet just from a look curved his lips. He lifted his hands and stacked them behind his neck. “Be my guest.”

The denim was stiff and she took her time peeling it back, easing the zipper down slowly. He was commando beneath and Karma leaned forward to press a kiss against the tattoo on his abdomen, teasingly close to his cock as she eased it free. She looked up at him and tugged his jeans a bit lower as she wet her lips. Heat flared in his eyes. “Enough.” Instantly, his jeans were gone and he stood before her, naked, willing and oh so able. She still had all her clothes on, right down to her Louboutins, and the contrast gave her a momentary illusion of control. Only the illusion though. They were doing things Prometheus’s way—a fact put to proof when he pressed her back to the bed and unbuttoned her blouse. With his teeth.

Her clothing peeled away, piece by piece, and he traced each inch of exposed flesh as he revealed it, his hand searing her with the warmth of his magic, leaving her skin dry and tingling in his wake. He removed her shoes and stockings last, taking his time over the length of her legs, before he came onto his hands and knees above her on the bed. His earlier frenzy seemed to have eased, soothed by the meticulous way he’d familiarized himself with every inch of her bare skin. There was still something of the animal in his eyes when he looked down at her, but now he looked puzzled by her, like she was prey who’d suddenly stopped running from the hunter and the hunter wanted to know why.

She reached up, threading her fingers into the hair at the base of his skull and dragging his mouth down to hers. “Stop thinking. Just kiss me.”

And he did. But it wasn’t the kiss she was expecting. It wasn’t the feral, animalistic ride. Not at first. No, this kiss started out sweet. A closed-mouth press of lips, teasing and sliding, coaxing and luring. He waited until her lips opened on a gasp before he snuck inside, a flick of his tongue, a suck on her lower lip, a nibble on the upper. The kiss was seduction. She’d thought she was already seduced, but as he lowered his body down to press against her, she realized she hadn’t begun to comprehend the word. Especially as the first spear of magic rolled off his tongue into her mouth.

His power spread through her body, leaving a liquid warmth and sparkling eagerness in its wake. It left her aware, almost on a cellular level. Not only of him, but of everything. The air, the light, the sounds—they were all simultaneously broken down to their most base parts and elevated to their most divine level. It was exquisite, that profound awareness, and it made every touch an exercise in intensity.

She was caught up in the symphony of a dust mote sparkling in the air when Prometheus shifted, sliding down her body, and with a brush of his tongue, the first lick of magic drove high inside her, yanking her from deliciously buzzed to orgasmic in the space of a heartbeat. Karma keened and fisted her hands on the duvet, grabbing for any fixed point as the world dipped and spun. More magic rolled on a condom as his hands were occupied elsewhere. He pressed a finger into her, then a second, curving them until she moaned, taking up a rhythm that had a scream building at the back of her throat, everything tight and wet and clenching down as she reached for another orgasm, fighting for that release, until he levered himself up over her, growled, “Stop trying to control everything, damn it,” jerked out his fingers, flicked her clit with a blast of magic and drove his cock up into her as she came and came.

She lost time—a second, a minute, a lifetime—who could tell? She came back to herself moaning. He had her wrists pinned over her head with one hand, her legs drawn up and wide apart as he plunged in to the hilt. There was nothing sane or human in his eyes and she shivered, the sight of that raw animalism almost enough to send her over again.

He jerked out of her all the way and she gave a little whimper of protest, causing him to grunt, “Not hard enough.” He flipped her onto her stomach, grabbing pillows and shoving them beneath her hips until she was elevated to his liking. He slapped her hands on the headboard, holding them there for a moment as the warmth of his chest pressed along the length of her spine. He spoke against her ear. “Hold on.” Then he was sliding in, high and hard and fast, over and over, and all she could do was press back and try not to cry from the bursting intensity that exploded along every nerve ending in a series of lightning strikes as he poured himself—his magic, his body, his tattered soul—into her.